The best free blogging sites

Using a free blogging platform makes having your own corner of the world wide web easier than you might think. Sure there’s the extended character count on Twitter to share your opinion, but these days people have a lot more to say, which is where which is where free blogging platforms come in very handy.

Having your own space online, that’s potentially free from the distractions of a billion adverts and countless competing status updates, is an attractive prospect. Blogging is also still a great, organic method of self-promo online, and the best thing is, there are a load of free blogging platforms out there to get you started.

1. Wix

If you want to get started with your free blog, Wix is well worth a look. This drag-and-drop website builder offers over 500 designer-made templates as well as plenty of additional features and apps, along with top-grade hosting so you can rest assured your site will be there when you need it.

You get 500MB storage and 1GB bandwidth with a free Wix account. If you need more – plus other features like your own domain, and online store and Google Analytics – then take a look at its premium plans.

Joomla

Open source software content management system Joomla is a popular choice among the blogging community. Powerful and flexible, Joomla can be used to build any kind of website or blog, with design features including the ability to create your own template and render HTML for objects/arrays of data. It also uses Bootstrap for perfect responsive designs.

Similar to WordPress.org, Joomla is a self-hosted solution, which means you will need a domain name and web hosting to use it (although there is an option to create a site on launch.joomla.org). The Joomla community is much smaller than WordPress community, so there are fewer themes and add-ons than for WordPress. But there are still hundreds of templates to choose from, and extensions to add more features, to fully customise your free blog’s design.

Yola

Yola limits you a bit if you have grand plans for your blog – you can only have two sites and three web pages with its free plan – but the upside is a healthy 1GB of storage and bandwidth, and your site won’t be littered with unsightly third-party ads.

Getting started is easy, with dozens of customisable templates to choose from, a straightforward site builder for putting everything together, flexible layouts and drag-and-drop widgets. And if you have the skills, then you can edit your CSS in order to fine-tune your site’s look.